Month: July 2018

The intelligentsia forms an important stratum in any society, and the so called socialist societies have had a peculiar fascination with intellectuals as a class. This probably has much to do with Marx as intellectual, and with the positivist progeny of the authoritarian strand of socialism sometimes known as “scientific […]

There’s a nasty habit now of the worst case scenario regarding North Korea’s nuclear programme turning out to be correct, and we’ve just got ourselves another instalment. Ankit Panda at The Diplomat has published an article, based on work at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies, revealing the probable location […]

Matter and antimatter can lead a separate existence but when they meet they annihilate each other. That is exactly what has just happened in Pyongyang following the latest visit of the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. Two mutually exclusive meanings of the one underlying concept and two mutually exclusive […]

The week has seen further developments regarding North Korea’s solid fuel missile programme. I have already written about some of those developments here. Basically, it appears that North Korea is upgrading and preparing to upgrade production facilities associated with the manufacture of its solid fuelled missiles, the Pukgugksong-1 and 2 […]

Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc, (New York, New York Review Books, 2018). It would be tempting to attribute Galen Strawson’s peculiar brand of naturalism to the hashish and the LCD, but readers of this site would know that I have long adhered to something […]

The previous week I wrote of US intelligence assessments on North Korea’s nuclear programme, which suggests that North Korea is not committed to nuclear disarmament let along complete, verified, and irreversible dismantlement of the type long demanded by the United States. I had argued that the Singapore summit and its […]

If you have been following the North Korean nuclear crisis closely you have been getting an equivalent of a Higgs boson and a gravitational wave about twice a week. Boy, was this week no exception. In fact, this weekend we got ourselves a particle that completely upends the standard model. […]